the basketball season: an autopsy

First thing on the docket is the congratulations that are in order for ACC Rookie of the Year Sylven Landesberg. Truly deserving - and the vote was much less close than I thought it would be. Landesberg is the fourth UVA player to win the award, and all the first two ever did was become UVA's only first overall NBA draft pick, and become UVA's all-time scoring leader. So, no pressure?

Unfortunately that's about three-fourths of the good news for this season. It was not, on the whole, good. 17 losses. In every conference but a select few of the worst (MEAC, for example), 17 regular season losses will land you squarely in the bottom half of the seedings. Whether it's the ACC or the Ivy League, 17 losses sucks. The season is about four months long - in the cutthroat world of the ACC, if you lose just three times a month, your ticket is punched for the bottom half of the conference and you tend to wonder if perhaps a change of head coaches is needed.

So it was a bad season, and you knew this. What you may find it interesting to be reminded of is that, as bad as things looked, we actually outperformed expectations. You'll note we were picked dead last in the preseason poll. A crude but fair way to use the poll to find the media's projection of conference wins is to divide the number of points in the poll by the total number possible (480) and multiply that by 16. That gives us a projected record of 2-14, which actually is what the last-place team got, only it wasn't us. We doubled that win total and did not finish last -take that, pundits.

I'll divide this up into four sections: the pluses, the "non-negatives" (of which there is only one), the minuses (AKA "What Went Wrong") and a premature look at what the future holds. The first two parts are today; the second two are Thursday or Friday otherwise this will turn into some kind of huge postmonster. Without further ado....

Pluses

- Sylven Landesberg, obviously. There's little need to expand much here. After two games it was evident the kid had major talent; after three, it seemed clear he was taking the reins as the go-to guy. If he stays four years, his #15 is the next number to be retired.

- Timely wins. Entries to the win column were few and far between. After beating Brown on January 7 to move to 7-5, there would be only three more victories in the following two months. But you couldn't have picked a better three to win. A home game romp over Virginia Tech and a season-finale, storybook victory over Maryland to give Mamadi Diane a night to remember. And a stirring home overtime win over Clemson to put an exclamation point on Sean Singletary's ceremony. Sometimes it's not how much you win but who you beat and when.

- Starting to crack the road jinx. Historically, we suck, and I mean suck, outside of Charlottesville. Especially in places like oh say Puerto Rico. Worse than a normal team. Now, we had some awful clunkers on the road, of course, but we had some awful clunkers at home, too. The point here is that going on the road, for once, didn't cause the clunkers, and we had some very good competitive games away from JPJA. Especially early in the season - right after the loss to Liberty would have been a great time for a Pete Gillen team to go to Syracuse and then Minnesota (two teams that are likely to end up in the Dance) and be a floormat. But we played those guys tough and could have beaten Syracuse with a little second-half defense. We went on the road for our first ACC win and played some very gutsy games in other teams' gyms as the season went on.

Non-negatives

There's really only one entry here, and his name is Dave Leitao. Most UVA fans have some kind of complaint about Leitao, and most of these fall into one of two categories. 1, he can't coach offense, and 2, he can't develop players. To be bluntly honest, I don't think there's much wrong with the offense that couldn't be fixed by having a couple players that could hit a gotdamn jump shot once in a while. Last in the conference in shooting both beyond and in front of the arc.

As for player development, one of the arguments that he can't develop players properly centers around John Brandenburg, a highly rated four-star recruit. The obvious counter is Assane Sene, a guy most thought would take tons of seasoning and experience before he really became useful. Turns out the guy can defend.

Anyway, the evidence just doesn't stack up. To say that Leitao can't develop players is to suggest that six-foot-nothing Sean Singletary should have been a first-round draft pick. Or maybe that Leitao turned Mamadi Diane from a real threat from outside into a benchwarmer. Or that a lightly-recruited transfer/walk-on from a local mid-major should somehow develop into a stud.

Another sometimes-cited example is Jeff Jones. True, Jones is one fine example of a guy who hasn't lived up to the recruiting ratings. But a guy who can't shoot, can't shoot. A coach can teach a lot of things. He can inspire a guy to play defense and he can teach how to run an offense and where to be, when. He can teach a guard the proper way to come off a screen and he can teach a post player correct footwork techniques. He can teach a point guard how to recognize a trap in a half-court press, and he can instill in his players a sense of when to shoot and when to pass. But if a guy can't shoot, he can't shoot, and two seasons of sub-.370 shooting is enough for me to know, Jeff Jones can't shoot. There's only so much a coach can do. Leitao's task here is not to wave a magic wand and turn Jeff Jones into J.J. Redick. He will have to find a role for Jones that minimizes his bad shots and sets him up for good ones.

I don't blame Dave Leitao for going 10-17. Leitao took what he was given, which was essentially a roll-of-the-dice recruiting pipeline and a superstud backcourt that covered up a lot of flaws, and molded it as best he could into as much success as could reasonably be expected. Pete Gillen didn't leave the cupboard bare, but if he'd had a really quality program to turn over to Leitao, he wouldn't have been let go in the first place. Having Sean Singletary and J.R. Reynolds around masked a ton of weaknesses and made a lot of players look better than they really were. With them both gone, Leitao is now rebuilding with his own pieces. And it's worth noting the cliff of irrelevance that DePaul has fallen off of in the four years since Leitao left.

In the next installment of this, I'll get down to the heart of the matter: Why We Sucked. And I'll try to guess at what next year might look like, and offer up my opinion on just how long 'Hoos should be patient with Dave Leitao

the homestretch, sort of

Forget, for a minute, about the DOOM that approacheth on Sunday. Tomorrow's the day to worry about that, because that's when I write a very emo game preview. Today, recruiting news, because it's that time of year. NLOID really ought to be a national holiday. It's gonna be hard trying to keep up with stuff at work and yet pretend like I'm actually doing something for king and country.

The 2009 and 2010 boards are both updated. Lest you think I'm slacking and getting in a rut, I'm also working on updating the depth chart by class, which will be presented all-new on or shortly after NLOID.

The updates:

- Lanford Collins will be a Hokie, and so he is off the board.

- The coaching staff is making all preps for an offer for WR Bobby Smith. If/when offered, he'll jump, so even though he's technically a Delaware commit, that is basically worth the paper it's not written on. He'll be a Hoo if we offer, much more likely than not.

- For 2010, I added Smith's teammate Marquis Wallace. We haven't offered yet, but we will. Also added LB Justin Maclin, although he could go to any school he wants within a 700-mile radius of his home and therefore will probably never leave the red on this board.

This party's not going to stop on NLOID, though. Morgan Moses is going to drag this thing out for a while, and the coaching staff seems bound and determined to get to 25 no matter how much attrition would be required over the summer to fit them all in, and so is working on a late surprise or two. (In case you're wondering, there is room for four more under the 25-limit.) There will be much to watch for the class of '09 even after Wednesday has come and gone.

Lastly, a piece of good news, because it concerns a most deserving recipient of said good news. The university announced today that Sean Singletary's number will be retired. Not "jersey" - they've done that already, and that's a sort of secondary honor because schools are kind of discouraged from retiring numbers - there's only so many you can hand out in football, and basketball has this weird rule that you can't have a number higher than 5 on the jersey, so those are limited too. But no, the number 44 will be retired in honor of Singletary. It's the right thing to do. Singletary played with all the guts and tenacity of Allen Iverson, only without the "PRACTICE?!?!" This kid was special from his very first year and now he'll be immortalized next to Ralph Sampson and Bryant Stith and the rest of them. He deserves it 110%.

playing catch-up

Spent a couple of days away, so right to it - the news you already know and the opinions you didn't know you needed.

First, the recruiting trail, which Groh & Co. are blazing at a furious pace. The latest commit is Justin Renfrow, and the CDP has the story here. The salient points are thus: Renfrow is out of William Penn Charter in Philly, which you know as the school that sent us Sean Singletary. So I love me some William Penn Charter. And Justin Renfrow loves him some UVA in return:

“Virginia had been my No. 1 school since my freshman year,” Renfrow said.

Besides the above quote, the CDP apparently can also be counted on for Baghdad Bob-ian exaggerations:

With numerous eye-popping offers coming almost daily, Justin Renfrow elected to follow in the footsteps of Sean Singletary.

And where are these "eye-popping" offers coming from?

Renfrow, a three-star recruit, boasted offers from Stanford, West Virginia, North Carolina, Connecticut, Duke and Temple, and discussed playing tight end with coaches from Miami and Louisville.

Huh. Well, since we're talking about football, and not, say, law degrees (or even basketball), Duke and Temple are the kind of offers that pretty much don't even cause your eye to lift from the newspaper it's reading let alone go BOING out of the skull. But that's neither here nor there. Renfrow is commit #17, and that number ties us for 5th with Auburn and Texas A&M in the country at the moment for number of recruits. Right now nobody can touch Ohio State, which is taking all the drama out of January for their fans by rolling in 24 commits before July. But damn - stack up the class of '09 against the class of '08 and you'll start to wonder what magical Recruitin' Elixir did Al Groh snarf up sometime in March?

And speaking of eye-popping offers, it's also nice to snag yet another one away from West Virginia. Having run out of eggs to throw at Rich Rodriguez's house, they've broken out a fresh batch of moonshine. MGoBlog used to tag posts "West Virginia is a post-apocalyptic den of insanity", and Brian didn't stop doing that because he ran out of material, he stopped because there's only so much gold you can carry back from the mine. I'm picking up for a little bit where he left off with this thread from their Scout board: Morgan Moses.

Moses is an offensive lineman that we're right in the hunt for; some WVU fans think there is no hunt because he's already silent-verbaled to Groh. This is of course the Scout board, where the polite way to describe most members is "hope springs eternal" and the truth is closer to "blindfolded psychos playing in traffic." Some gems:

he will be surrounded by inferrior talent at UVa, in the WVU spread he will be blocking for the best run game in college football, he will be on TV every january and on featured ESPN games multiple times a year, UVA he might get one national game a year, two IF they would make a bowl, BIG IF though!

Taking a quick look at our TV schedule so far - yup, "ESPN" is still attached to the first set of games - apparently 1 = 3 in WVU Math. Which bodes ill for this next statement:

Once you get 500 miles outside either school everyone thinks WVU education is just as good.

Uh, yeah.

Moving on.

The NBA draft was yesterday night. Sean Singletary, who would not let his 6'0"-on-stilts body stop him from knocking over a rhinoceros if it was between him and an offensive rebound, and who needs something named after him at UVA the sooner the better, became the first Hoo drafted to the League since Roger Mason. Mason, you may remember, was drafted by the Bulls, didn't stick, bounced around Europe for a little while, and is now a respectable if not well-known bench contributor for the Wizards. Singletary is in a decent spot - about as decent as a second-round pick can be in, anyway. The Kings (for that is his new team) have Beno Udrih as their starting point guard, which is in large part why they suck; Udrih was 44th in APG this year. The Kings also have Anthony Johnson and Quincy Douby - both are, technically, schmos. It may be a bit much to expect Singletary to be the Kings' starting point guard coming out of camp next October, but there is a real opportunity for him to make himself part of the rotation.